It took several days to put fireplaces and chimneys on every house in her demesne. At some point, Riz started carrying around a little wooden stool instead of a stone one, probably freshly made by the carpenters. Lori had to admit, it was more comfortable to sit on since the seat was wider. Eventually though, all the chimneys were complete, even with Lori needing to go back and make some of the early chimneys taller.

When Lori finished the last chimney, she just stood back and looked over it all. No smoke rose from any of the chimneys save the ones she had just completed that day, to test if the chimney worked. She had made clear—well, had her temporary Rian make clear for her, but it was the same thing—that even if everyone had fireplaces now, meals would still be communal in the dining rooms, since that was more efficient all around, and it would hopefully prevent people from hoarding food and food going to waste from subpar storage facilities.

To her surprise, most people seemed to not be testing her on this. At least, people were putting food into the stores, and only the kitchen workers were taking any out. And Lori turned a blind eye to the occasional small verminous beast—what people had taken to calling chokers, from the sounds they made when hunted—roasting in the bonfires outside of the bath houses and even in front of Rian's house. The little things barely counted as a snack, especially when shared among so many, and it wasn't like that they had found any more happyfruit.

Ugh, she wanted a happyfruit. She wanted something sweet…

"You and everyone else, Great Binder," Riz said over dinner, looking like she meant it. She'd taken to carrying around a plank of wood and a burnt stick, just like Rian had. Did. He was probably still carrying it around right then… "The only sweet stuff left in the demesne that's edible is honey, and that's being stockpiled in case of injuries or midwinter, whichever comes first."

Lori blinked at that, looking up from the chatrang board. "Why would…" She sighed as she realized. "Rian?"

Riz nodded, a small, fond smile on her lips. "Rian. He said by the middle of winter, we'd all need it to feel better, and if we ate it before then, we'd regret it. And related to that… the sweetbugkeepers say they need to move the sweetbugs somewhere indoors for winter soon, for safety's sake, and so that if we have a winter dragon, they won't have to try dragging the sweetbug's hive through however much snow or mud we get."

Lori considered that and nodded, glancing back toward the board, then moving her Horotract to block Mikon's Mentalist. On the opposite side of the table, Mikon made a frustrated sound in her throat. Ah, the pleasure of knowing you'd made the move someone was hoping you wouldn't. Had she gotten better at this game, or was Mikon just that bad? It was probably the latter, but it felt like the former…

"I'll build something," Lori said. "How big does it need to be?"

"They didn't say—" Lori translated that to 'she didn't ask', "—just that it needed to be indoors and safe from dragons." Lori looked at her. Riz sighed. "I'll ask for more details, Great Binder."

Lori nodded. Good. "Good. What else?"

Riz checked her plank. "Uh… oh, Clowee—uh, the ferrywoman who operates the boat—" Riz suddenly cut off, glancing at Lori. Mikon, who'd been about to make her move on the board, also paused, hand outstretched.

"Yes? Go on. What about her?" Lori said.

Riz and Mikon glanced at each other, confused. "Ah… she's asking if it's possible for you to build a dock on the other side of the river, since it would make loading the boat…" Riz trailed off for a moment, eyeing Lori, before continuing, "…so that… loading the ropeweed will be easier."

Lori considered that, then nodded again. "Yes, I see her point. I'll build it tomorrow. Tell her to expect me so she can bring me across." Lori hummed in thought. "After breakfast should do. Tell her."

"Uh… yes, Great Binder…"

Lori nodded, then turned to Mikon. "You were going to move?"

Mikon blinked. "I was… Oh!" Mikon moved one of her lords. Unlike the militia, it could move two spaces instead of one. With her Mentalist blocked, the weaver seemed to be trying to either bait Lori or threaten her.

Lori resisted the urge to shake her head. Mikon was too focused on a particular area of the board. She responded by moving her own Mentalist diagonally to threaten both Mikon's Deadspeaker and her Whisperer.

Mikon made another frustrated sound in her throat.

Riz glanced sideways at her, then sighed and reached out to pat the weaver on the shoulder. "You can do it. Just… remember to look at the whole board, all right?"

Mikon turned to look at Riz imploringly.

"No hints," Lori said flatly.

"No hints, no hints," the temporary Rian said hastily. "Just… giving general advice!"

Lori gave her a suspicious look.

"I'll just eat," Riz muttered, pulling her hand back and focusing on her bowl of food.

Lori kept looking at her, then nodded and focused back on her game and her food. Mikon sighed but did the same as well. Or at least focused on the game again instead of flirting with Riz. Lori couldn't be sure that was the weaver's intention, but Riz had touched her, so it had probably been intended flirting…

Well, not her problem. Lori just had to keep her Binder alive and keep other wizards away from her core to win.

Which was exactly like her life right now, actually.

Perhaps she hadn't given chatrang enthusiasts enough credit. Now that she was a Dungeon Binder, a lot of its mechanics were making more sense…

…

No, no, it was still overrated. Even ignoring the fact that players took turns and knew exactly where everyone's pieces were, the fact that you couldn't bribe any of your opponents' pieces over to your side, use your Deadspeaker to secretly control one of your opponent's pieces as an undead, or have to worry about one of your other wizards trying to kill you themselves and take your core as their own made the game extremely unrealistic. That wasn't even getting into the fact that with a Horotract on both sides, the battlefield should be far more malleable…

Still, it was fun to play, especially when she was winning.

Well, only when she was winning…

But she was winning right now, so she was going to enjoy it as long as she could!

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The next day, after breakfast, Lori went to build the dock on the other side of the river. In hindsight, she probably should have done that sooner. The river cut her demesne… well, not exactly in half. From what she could tell through what she perceived of the wisps in her demesne, because of the river's bends and curves the half of the demesne on the other side of the river was actually bigger, in terms of land area.

There was a cleared space on the other side of the river, almost directly opposite her Dungeon, where the ropeweed and most anything else had been cut down, though there were browning stalks sticking out of the dirt. It was as good a place to put the dock as any.

Lori started by compacting and leveling that path of dirt so that she'd have someplace to stand on and stack her stone. It didn't need to be perfectly level, it just needed to be stable. Then she got to work excavating the river.

This side of the river was about the same as the other side. There was a layer of cold silt with a few rocks mixed in, held down by a mix of roots and having been shaped by the river to provide the least resistance for the water after the silt settled. Lori ignored that, focusing on what was beneath, more solid. The bedrock.

It wasn't that deep, but it would certainly be time-consuming and difficult to reach if anyone tried to get at it without some kind of preparation. Still, as Dungeon Binder, it was simple for her to bind the earthwisps of the stone through her core and deform it to pull it up to the surface. She bound the bedrock over a long, wide area, sinking several spots so that the stone there could flow towards the spot she was raising up above the water.

In stories, when Whisperers or Dungeon Binders made stone rise out of the ground to form walls or whole buildings, the stories never mentioned where they got the stone from. You couldn't use Whispering to create stone, after all. At least, not in the same way that Whispering could create light, darkness, lightning and heat. The stone had to come from somewhere. Whenever Lori heard those stories—at least, after she started learning how to Whisper—she always wondered if there was now an airless void underground just waiting to collapse into a pit. At least most history books would mention where the stone came from when Whisperers made walls. Usually, there was suddenly a dry moat on the other side, which made good tactical sense.

The spot next to the riverbank that she'd compacted sank, the soft silt moving down with it as Lori excavated the new dock. It was, in her opinion, quite elegant. After all, the water next to the dock needed to be fairly deep so that the ice boat wouldn't scrape along the bottom, and given the length and width of Lori's Ice Boat (the second), that meant a reasonably large area had to be sunk, which just mean more rock for her to build the dock with.

The dock itself couldn't be a solid wall of rock blocking the river, or else the interruption of the current would cause an eddy where silt would quickly build up. She'd learned that the last time she'd made one. Instead, under the wide stone platform were wide openings under the surface that allowed the river to pass through, with stone arches to support the weight of the platform and send it down into the bedrock.

It was a relatively simple but time consuming thing to build, since Lori couldn't actually see what she was building. She had to rely on using her perceptions of waterwisps and earthwisps, comparing the shapes she felt to her perception of the shapes of the other structures she'd already built.

This was so much harder without Rian. When they'd last built the dock, she had Rian to dive down into the water for her and even measure the exact curve of the arches under the water…

Still, the dock was still sturdy for all that the understructure wasn't as exact as she'd have wanted. It was solid under her feet when she stomped on it, with no concerning shifts or vibrations. She reluctantly declared the dock complete, and had to resist the urge to put a binding on the stone's earthwisps to reinforce its structure as she made a hole for a wooden post that the boat could be tied to so it wouldn't drift off.

It took her all of that day to complete, stopping for lunch along the way, and she rode with everyone else on the Lori's Ice Boat when it was time to eat, sitting alone in the rear corner of the boat opposite the ferrywoman operating the tiller and water jet built into it. No one sat next to her or tried to talk to her beyond bowing when they passed her.

The ferrywoman took her back to the other side once she'd declared the dock finished at about midafternoon, along with a partial load of ropeweed and firewood. Lori acknowledged the bows of the people coming to unload the boat with a negligent wave, and was glad they knew better than to offer their hands when she stood to get off the boat.

She found her footsteps taking her to Rian's house. It stood empty, the door closed, the little binding of lightwisps glowing on the outside wall. The fire pit in front of it was clear of ashes, and someone had already stacked a few pieces of wood there for later that night.

For a while, she stared at the empty house. Then she sighed, shook her head, and went to off to find something else to do until dinner. There was always something that needed to be done, at least…